Column: The journalists in your community are already afraid. That should worry you, too

Every day the Citizen Times staff and I walk through a set of glass doors that serve as the only barrier between us and the public. I’ve been walking through those doors for 8 years now. They lead to a small, community newsroom very much like the Capital Gazette. Chillingly so, I learned Thursday.

My heart aches for my colleagues in Maryland today. Words cannot express it. So I won’t try to make them. But one of the five newspaper employees who died Thursday edited opinions, like me, and wrote columns, like this one. So it aches a bit more.

We only know bits and pieces about the motivation of the shooter that made our nightmare a reality in Annapolis today. And the inner workings of that one sick mind won’t tell us much about the state of our profession or the danger monsters like him pose to us.

But what we already know, and what will be true long after the breathless TV news panels and Twitter squabbles subside, is the daily reality for community journalists in America and the fear that we rarely talk about while we scramble toward deadlines, rinse and repeat.

We don’t talk about it because we’re tough, and because we don’t want to be the story. And we don’t talk about it because we think it’s part of the job. It’s what we signed up for, along with the long hours and crummy pay and endless meetings and cold calls to people in their darkest hours.

The fact that people hate you - and that many of those people have guns - is in the unspoken contract. It always has been.

But things have changed recently.

I’ve been sifting through the vitriolic sludge of reader outrage for almost a decade now. We’re all used to fists being shaken at us, and some days we deserve it.

But something has shifted in this country in the last couple of years, and it worries me in ways that make it hard to sleep, and to wake, and to work. It worries me for our future, and for yours, too.

With every pointed finger by our now-president toward a riser full of journalists, the anger became hotter. With every utterance of the phrase “fake news” and “enemies of the people,” the waters of toxic rage grew a little higher. With every vitriolic tweet and empty, or not so empty threat, our chests became a little tighter.

And even though we don’t talk about it, because we’re tough and we’re pros, it became more frightening. Terrifying, some days. Like today.

When I covered Mitt Romney rallies, the folks who thought a member of “the media” wouldn’t do right by them said it plainly and walked away. When I asked the same questions of that party’s supporter’s last year, they spat at me and threw cups at my feet and called me a lying bitch.

When I took calls a few years ago from readers who didn’t like the political coverage I was putting out or the columns I wrote, they said they’d pray for me and worried I’d go to hell. Now, they call me a slut, or they say I’ll get what’s coming to me.

And they say it like they are quenching something deep inside themselves, like they’re rooting against a cartoon villain or a rabid animal. They say it like they’re the good guy, because someone has told them too many times that they are.

At some point, we went in these moments from being the bad neighbors who pissed somebody off for leaving the garbage cans out too long, to being something far less than human. To too many, we became something dangerously less real, and less worthy of existing, much less doing our jobs.

It seems based on early reports that the shooter had anger that far pre-dated our current political climate, but the dangers of this rising tide of hatred for our profession remain the same.

When we first got word about this shooting and gathered around the TV - a familiar ritual in every newsroom since TVs were there to be gathered ‘round - we made sure the news got out, then remarked on how surprising it was that this was the first of its kind.

We glanced at the glass walls behind the TV screen, then went back to work to get the paper out, just like I’d imagine most every journalist did on Thursday. The fact that our colleagues in Annapolis, who watched their colleagues be murdered hours earlier, did the same thing Thursday night is moving in a way that I cannot describe. But it, too, is unsurprising.

It’s what we do.

There is no hierarchy of professions who deserve more or less to be shot by some maniac. And there is no doubt that journalists across this country will continue sitting in cubicles behind frighteningly fragile glass walls to keep doing their work. I know I will.

But I worry that the risks of this profession – both the mortal ones, and those that take years to drown us, toxic drop by drop - will outweigh the reward soon for too many of our best fighters, those still standing tirelessly on the front lines of democracy and decency and the humanity we have so clearly lost.

I think you should be worried about that too. If not because you know that you need us, then because the Capital Gazette put a paper out last night.

This is the opinion of Casey Blake. Follow her on Twitter at @CaseyBlakeACT.